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YL— THE FUNCTIONS OF STATE AND LOCAL HISTORICAL 

SOCIETIES WITH RESPECT TO RESEARCH 

AND PUBLICATION. 



By J. F. JAMESON, Ph. D., 
PKOFESSOK, BROWN UNIVERSITY. 



51 



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THE FUNCTIONS OF STATE AND LOCAL HISTORICAL SOCIETIES 
WITH RESPECT TO RESEARCH AND PUBLICATION. 



By J. F. Jamesox. 



The historical societies of the United States have many and 
interesting functions. They must collect and preserve histor- 
ical material, printed and manuscript, and must maintain 
libraries and museums, well catalogued and accessible; they 
must print and publish; they must arouse public interest, and 
keep alive a patriotic regard for local history; they must take 
part in celebrations; they must accumulate biographical and 
obituary records; they must attract money and members. We 
all know that, consideriug their resources, they do most of these 
things exceedingly well. Each of us knows the serious eftbrts 
which his own society makes to accomplish these tasks; each 
of ns is under frequent obligations to other societies for the 
fruits of their zealous and successful labors. The development 
of their libraries in particular can not fail to excite admiration. 
It may be said with conlidence that there is no other country 
in the world in which the libraries of historical societies have 
so important a place as they have among the libraries of the 
United States. 

But, if it is our practice with some regularity to examine the 
publications of these societies, must we not confess to a con- 
siderable degree of uneasiness and disappointment with respect 
to their performance of this particular function? The more 
certainly will this be our feeling if it is also our habit to keep 
an eye on the contemporary publications of the European his- 
torical societies. To make the comparison in absolute terms 
would be obviously nufair. The historical societies of a coun- 
try like ours ought not to be expected to rival the published 
work of such organizations as the Socii'te de I'Histoire de 
France or the Scottish History Society. But even if we avoid 
the comi3arison with societies planted in cities so large as Paris 

-)3 



54 AMERICAN HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION. 

or SO eminent for literary traditions as Ediiibuigh, there is still 
much to mortify and to incite ns. The ordinary provincial 
historical Journal of France or Germany is, we are obliged to 
confess, considerably superior to that of America in scholar- 
ship and in the amount of really important contribution to 
historical knowledge. Doubtless they have the advantage of 
being able to appeal to a larger body of cultivated and schol- 
arly readers. But at least it will not be thought unfair to 
compare the present published work of our historical societies 
with that which they were doing forty years ago. Many of 
them are now printing a larger amount, some of them are 
printing work superior in quality, but most of them, it seems 
to me, are decidedly not showing that improvement in product 
which might justly be expected in view of the far more advanced 
state of historical knowledge in the country at large. We have 
also to remember the superior pecuniary resources of our soci- 
eties, which form probably the richest body of such societies 
in the world. Upon a hasty estimate their buildings are cer- 
tainly worth in the aggregate a million dollars, their libraries 
nearly or quite that, their endowments another million. So far 
as publications are concerned, the results are lamentably out 
of proportion to this gigantic investment. 

May we not profitably inquire what have been the leading- 
causes that have kept our societies from attaining that develop- 
ment we should have wished them to attain in respect to their 
functions of publication and research, andby what means their 
advancement in these respects might be promoted! It will 
probably be found that the suggestions here made are appli- 
cable rather to the historical societies of the older States, 
private endowed oi'ganizations having few or no statutory 
duties and public responsibilities, than to those State societies, 
closely connected with their State governments, upon whose 
functions Mr. Thwaites can discourse with so preeminent 
knowledge and authority. And certainly the suggestions are 
made with full knowledge of tlie fact that each society has its 
peculiar needs and duties, and that criticism and suggestion 
can be expressed only in general terms. 

In the first place, should we not all agree that our older his- 
torical societies have often seemed to conceive of their respec- 
tive fields and duties iu too narrow, and even parochial, a 
sense? The reason for their existence is, of couixse, local his- 
tory, and they win their public support, their money, and 



STATE AND LOCAL HISTORICAL SOCIETIES. 55 

their members by devoting themselves to local history. But 
there are some tojiics of local history which are purely local 
and nothing else, and there are those which, while no less 
important to the history of the locality, are also of signilicauce 
with respect to the larger life of the nation. The historical 
society which devotes itself to the former when it might be 
doing something to elucidate the latter fails of the best part 
of its mission. Is a subject in the history of the locality more 
worthy of the society's time and money because nobody out- 
side of the locality can by any possibility be expected to take 
an interest in if? On the contrary, it is Just these subjects 
.which deaden historical societies. If the State or the locality 
has any importance whatever which should make it worth 
while to have its history studied, it is because it has played 
some part in the life of the world. This is the thing to work 
at. Hoc opits, hie, labor. Everyone knows that one of the 
leading defects of American historical writing has been that 
the writers knew too little of other history. So it is with 
local histor3\ jSTeither men nor societies can hope to deal with 
it rightly unless their minds are full of American history at 
large and quick to see the relations of their tasks to that 
which explains them and gives them meaning. It is Just this 
intelligent appreciation which gives to French local historical 
Journals a large part of that superiority which has been 
remarked. Nor would the intellectual quickening which would 
come from such a transfer of attention, such consideration of 
the real importance of topics, be balanced by any material loss. 
The interest of local readers and subscribers would be held 
Just as well or better. It should be remembered that things 
are not as they were fifty years ago. With increase of inter- 
communication purely local feeling has become less acute. 
The number of people who care a rush whether the Blue Boar 
Tavern stood in First street or in Second street, or who can 
excite themselves over silly questions of local priority in this 
or that small achievement, has grown considerably smaller 
and is constantly diminishing. Meanwhile the number of 
persons who have read a considerable amount of general 
American history or who take an intelligent interest in it, has 
greatly increased. It is to these people that societies must, 
in the long run, make their api)eal for pecuniary and other 
support. It is highly probable that, by avoiding fussy anti- 
quarianism and looking chietly at the larger aspects of local 
history, they would accomplish the difficult feat of serving 



56 AMERICAN HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION. 

both God and mammon. Not a few of oar bistorical societies 
consist of two or tliree liundred sustaining members, who like 
to lielp in keeping up such an institutioUj and wlio are not 
without interest in American history, but who never attend 
the meetings, which have become the exchisive property of a 
few fossilized antiquarians. Would not fresh life be brought 
in if the society were to perceive clearly that its held of work 
is, rightly stated, American historij locally exemplified ? 

Another class of persons who ought to be more actively 
interested in local historical societies is that of college teach- 
ers of history. This thought may properly be dwelt upon for 
a moment, for an insufficient degree of cooperation between 
the historical professors and the historical societies (a coopera- 
tion the promotion of which was at the beginning one of the 
prime objects of this association) is an evil of serious impor 
tance. Its importance cannot be rightly estimated unless we 
take into account the present stage of historical studies among 
us and the stage into which we are probably proceeding. 
Predictions are dangerous. But the intense conflicts of the 
Eeiorination brought forward in every country a generation of 
political historians, an age in which the minds of statesmen 
turned by a natural attraction toward history. Upon that 
age ensued, by a natural evolution, an age devoted chiedy to 
works of erudition, the publication of sources, the labors appro- 
priate to academies and Benedictines. So the storm and stress 
of the French revolution generated a crop of political his- 
torians, the best part of the historical work coming from the 
hands of public men, like Mackintosh and Macaulay, Guizot 
and Thiers, Niebuhr and Bancroft and Herculano. There are 
not wanting signs in England and France, in Germany and 
America, that we are next proceeding, by a natural evolution, 
into a period characterized, I will not say by Benedictine 
achievements, but by extensive documentary publication and 
other academic labors. For the work of such a period the 
most appropriate agents in our country are the organized his 
torical societies and the representatives of history in the uni- 
versities. It would be a thousand pities if they should be 
allowed to drift apart. Yet they will inevitably do so if the 
societies are permitted to look upon their tasks of local history 
with purely local eyes; for the professor is daily occupied 
with the teaching of general American history. His mind is 
set on that. He can care little for local history that has not 
an infusion of that larger element. 



STATE AND LOCAL HTSTOKTCAL SOCIETIES. 57 

It is a part of the same general siiggestiou if one goes on to 
say, in the second place, that our historical societies would add 
greatly to their usefulness if, in their published work and what 
they do in furtherance of research, they would pay more atten- 
tion to the more recent periods of American history. Speak- 
ing of the older States only, it may almost be said that their 
historical societies pay twice as much attention to the period 
of exploration and first settlement as to all the rest of the 
seventeenth century, twice as much to the period anterior to 
1700 as to that from 1700 to 1775, and none whatever to that 
since the Eevolution. However great our passion for origines, 
can we defend this as rational? If the story of the past lias a 
value because of its influence on the present, can we justify 
our neglect of that portion of the past which has been most 
directly influential, the more recent past? The field of colonial 
origins has been abundantly, almost superabundantly, culti- 
vated. We could get along if for ten years no man printed 
another account of the early days of New England. Mean- 
while how unsatisfactory is, for instance, our knowledge of the 
constitutions of the colonies in the half century preceding the 
Revolution, how complete our ignorance of State politics dur- 
ing the thirty years beginning in 1789? Fifty years ago it was 
perhaps reasonable to stop short with the Revolution. But the 
Revolution is now fifty years farther away, and surely in the 
hundred and twenty years since its time many interesting- 
things have happened in the State and the locality as well as 
in the nation. Doubtless there are many persons to whose dim 
minds the phrase "American history" brings up instantly and 
solely the image of the Revolutionary war. Apparently most 
members of State legislatures belong to this class. But after 
all it is not to these that the society's publications are chiefly 
addressed. An historical society must not disdain i)opnlarity; 
but it shows a woful, and to my mind a quite unnecessary, want 
of courage if it avoids topics of real importance because they 
are not yet objects of popular interest, or permits poi)ular 
fancies to divert it from what it really thinks to be its best work. 

This inevitably leads one to say a word concerning genealo- 
gies, Rejice aniles fabulas, saith the Scripture — rejice geneal- 
ogias. It is a ticklish business to take up one's parable against 
them in these days, when many an historical society is finding 
that by far the greater number of those who resort to its library 
come there for no other purpose than to hunt up their genealo- 
gies and to prove their right to entrance into the charmed 



58 AMERICAN HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION. 

circle of the Sons of This or the Daughters of That. But 
nevertheless no historical society has a right to use its research 
and publication funds in furthering the purposes of these peo- 
ple, or, as one society does, to buy almost notliing but genealo- 
gies with its library fund. These funds were presumably given 
to the society for the furtherance of history. To use them for 
geuealogical researches, for the publication or purchase of 
genealogies, is in almost all cases a gross misuse. The theory 
is of course that genealogy is an important aid to history. But 
is it, now and in this country? Volumes upon volumes of it 
have been printed. Search through the whole tiresome mass, 
and do you get a handful of historical wheat out of all this 
chaff, this pitiful accumulation of names and dates? But one 
answer is possible. The theory is, so far as this country is 
concerned, a mere superstition, one of Lord Bacon's idola fori. 
Geography is far more useful to history than genealogy; but 
what should we think of an historical society that bought noth 
iug but atlases and printed nothing but maps? The addiction 
of historical societies to genealogies arises not from devotion 
to the primary and public purposes for which they were insti- 
tuted, but from a weak desire to placate people who, it is 
thought, may in time, if sufficiently indulged, turn from their 
personal and private interest in their ancestry, and begin to 
take an interest in history. They may, but meantime is Amer- 
ican history being rightly used ? 

To return to more positive suggestions, how neglected is the 
field of American economic history so far as our societies are 
concerned ! If the world of European historical scholarship is 
turning more and more to the consideration of that subject, 
how much more ought this to be the case in a country like 
ours, a nev? country, a country in which constitution til and 
political development, the traditional subjects of historical 
study, have been at every step conditioned, directed, and con- 
trolled by economic factors and the course of economic evolu- 
tion. But how little has been done in this direction aside from 
the history of the Federal finances! Here again the course 
which, on intellectual grounds, is so warmly to be advocated 
would almost certainly be profitable in a nuindane sense, for 
there is nothing more certain to interest the business man, that 
arbiter of all American destinies, than the history of American 
business. 

Ikit in all these lines of publishing activity, which recommend 



STATE AND LOCAL HLSTORICAL SOCIETIES. 59 

themselves to our minds as we survey the field, surely we shall 
all agree that what is most necessary is not the printing of 
essays and articles, but tlie printing of documents and materi- 
als. Documentary publication is the work which counts in the 
long run, the work which gives permanent value to the socie- 
ty's volumes. Look over the volumes publislied by the societies 
a generation ago. Nearly all the articles and essays are obso 
lete or anticpiated. Such of them as were ever worth doing 
will have to be done over again. But the original documents 
then printed are still valid, still useful. The real glory of an 
historical society is a series of volumes of important historical 
documents, original materials selected with intelligence, sys- 
tematically ordered, edited ably, and with finished scholarship. 
All these counsels are in the last analysis counsels of energy 
and courage. Energy can not always be commanded; the 
work of societies must be done by the members it possesses, 
and fortunate are those who possess a group of active and 
resourceful members; doubly fortunate if their organization 
is such as to give the control to these rather than to those who 
are oldest, or to those who are richest, or to those eminent for 
something else quite alien to the business of history. But the 
counsel of courage is for all. Placed in the midst of material 
influences, our historical societies are charged with immate- 
rial, one may even say spiritual, interests. They must be in 
and of the world. But they are wanting in insiglit and in 
tliat faith in American humanity which the study of Amer- 
ican history should create if they do not believe it safe for 
them to cherish high and even austere ideals of scholarly 
endeavor; and they are recreant to their high trust if, having 
formed such ideals, they fail to pursue them in all the great 
work that lies before them, confident that before long their 
communities will appreciate and sustain their efforts. Like 
all of us in this complex and vulgar world, they must make 
compromises and adjust themselves with outward cheerfulness 
to the actual conditions of their life; but at least let them 
economize their concessions, and keep alive an inward regret 
and dissatisfaction over every sacrifice ol their true ideals. 



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